JAKARTA, Indonesia – An Indonesian military plane carrying more than 100 people crashed into several homes and burst into flames Wednesday, killing at least 79 people, officials said.

Dozens were injured and more were feared dead, with local television flashing footage of fire engulfing the mangled wreckage. Black smoke billowed in the air, as soldiers carried badly burnt bodies on stretchers to waiting ambulances.

Air force spokesman Bambang Sulistyo said at least 79 people were killed when the C-130 Hercules crashed near a base in East Java province early Wednesday. There were 112 passengers and crew on board.

Military spokesman Sagom Tamboen said the aircraft was transporting troops and their families, including at least 10 children, when it tumbled from the sky near an air force base in East Java province.

It smashed into a row of houses in Geplak village, killing three on the ground, before skidding into a rice field.

The tail of the plane and several large parts of its charred body were scattered in the paddy and nearby bushes.

It was not clear what caused the crash, the latest in a string to hit the air force.

But several witnesses described hearing a large explosion while it was still in the air and then seeing it split apart.

“One of the wings fell off,” Agus Yulianto, a villager, was quoted as saying on the Web site of Kompas newspaper. “Then the plane nose-dived into the houses.”

The accident occurred 325 miles (520 kilometers) east of the capital, Jakarta.

The country’s air force has long complained of being underfunded and handicapped by a recently lifted U.S. ban on weapons sales. It has suffered a series of accidents, including a Fokker 27 plane that crashed into an airport hangar last month, killing all 24 onboard.

A series of commercial airline crashes in recent years has killed more than 120 people in Indonesia.

Tokyo, January 30, 2009: Today, Japan Airlines (JAL) became the first airline to conduct a demonstration flight using a sustainable biofuel primarily refined from the energy crop, camelina. It was also the first demo flight using a combination of three sustainable biofuel feedstocks, as well as the first one using Pratt & Whitney engines. The results of the flight are expected to conclusively confirm the second-generation biofuel’s operational performance capabilities and potential commercial viability.

The approximately one and half-hour demo flight using a JAL-owned Boeing 747-300 aircraft, carrying no passengers or payload, took off from Haneda Airport, Tokyo at 11:50am (JST). A blend of 50% biofuel and 50% traditional Jet-A jet (kerosene) fuel was tested in the No.3 engine (middle right), one of the aircraft’s four Pratt & Whitney JT9D engines. No modifications to the aircraft or engine were required for biofuel, which is a ‘drop-in’ replacement for petroleum-based fuel.

The JAL cockpit crew onboard the aircraft checked the engine’s performance during normal and non-normal flight operations, which included quick accelerations and decelerations, and engine shutdown and restart. A ground-based preflight test was conducted the day before the flight to ensure that the No. 3 engine functioned normally using the biofuel/ traditional Jet-A fuel blend. Captain Keiji Kobayashi who piloted the aircraft said, ‘Everything went smoothly. There was no difference at all in the performance of the engine powered by the biofuel blend, and the other three engines containing regular jet fuel.”

Data recorded on the aircraft will now be analyzed to determine if equivalent engine performance was seen from the biofuel blend compared to typical Jet A fuel. The initial analysis of the data will take several weeks and will be conducted by team members from Boeing, Japan Airlines, and Pratt& Whitney.

The biofuel component tested was a mixture of three second-generation biofuel feedstocks: camelina (84%), jatropha (under 16%), and algae (under 1%). Second-generation feedstocks do not compete with natural food or water resources and do not contribute to deforestation practices. The primary benefit of using biofuels in a commercial jetliner is their ability to reduce greenhouse gases throughout their entire lifecycle, while also helping to improve the environmental performance of commercial aviation and the planes that are flying today.

JAL Group President and CEO, Haruka Nishimatsu applauded the flight saying, “Today is an extremely important day for Japan Airlines, for aviation, and for the environment. The demonstration flight brings us ever closer to finding a ‘greener’ alternative to traditional petroleum-based fuel. When biofuels are produced in sufficient amounts to make them commercially viable, we hope to be one of the first airlines in the world to start powering our aircraft using them.”

Boeing Japan President, Nicole Piasecki said, “We are hopeful that within the next 3-5 years, commercial aircraft will begin flying revenue passenger flights using sustainable next-generation biofuels. There are remaining hurdles to overcome, including gaining the support of regulators, airports, fuel distributors and others, as well as increasing the production of environmentally and socially responsible fuel sources. Our industry is already working to secure its fuel future supply by establishing firm sustainability criteria to ensure that the environmental impacts and carbon dioxide emissions from biofuels are significantly lower than fossil fuel-based kerosene fuels.”

The fuel for the JAL demo flight was successfully converted from plant-based crude oil to biofuel, then blended with typical jet fuel by Honeywell’s UOP, a refining technology developer, using proprietary hydro-processing technology. Subsequent laboratory testing by Boeing, UOP, and several independent laboratories verified the biofuel met the industry criteria for jet fuel performance.

Jennifer Holmgren, General Manager of UOP Renewable Energy and Chemicals said, “We have proven that we can produce renewable jet fuel from sustainable resources that is a drop in replacement eliminating the need for costly changes to the fuels infrastructure and transportation fleet. This technology can be utilized to begin making an impact on the aviation fuel supply in as little as three years.”

“Ground-based jet engine performance testing last year by Pratt & Whitney of similar fuels further established that the biofuel blend either meets or exceeds the performance criteria that is in place for commercial aviation jet fuel today”, added Greg Gernhardt, Asia Pacific Region Vice President, Pratt & Whitney Commercial Engines & Global Services.

Sustainable Oils, Inc., a U.S.-based provider of renewable, environmentally clean, and high-value camelina-based fuels sourced the camelina used in the JAL demo flight. Terasol Energy sourced and provided the jatropha oil, and the algae oil was provided by Sapphire Energy. Nikki Universal, a joint venture of UOP and JGC, supplied the biofuel used in the flight, which had been produced in the U.S by UOP.

Also known as gold-of-pleasure or false flax, camelina is good candidate for a sustainable biofuel source, given its high oil content and ability to grow in rotation with wheat and other cereal crops. The crop is mostly grown in more moderate climates such as the northern plains of the U.S and Canada, and originally hails from northern Europe and Central Asia. Test plots are also underway in Malaysia, South Korea, Ukraine and Latvia.

“There are currently a few thousand acres under management, with an expectation of hundreds of thousands of acres within three years. Within 5 years, projections are for between 100 million and 200 million gallons of camelina-based sustainable jet fuel,” said Tom Todaro, CEO of Sustainable Oils.

A Boeing 737-800 of Turkish Airlines from Istanbul has crashed at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam with 135 passengers and crew on board while attempting to land. At least 9 people are dead, 86 injured of whom 25 critically. Three cockpit crew are dead.

The Boeing 737 is lying on its belly beyond a runway, inside a polder. Both engines broke off and are lying about 20 metres away from the plane. The wreckage pattern is small – indicating that it simply fell down, it did not slide. There has been no fire. Experts say it looks as though the pilot tried to make an emergency landing. Witnesses said it seemed to ‘just fall from the sky’ after it had slowed down to a very slow pace, its tail had touched the farm land first and then it just ‘fell down’ and broke into three sections.

Hero passenger:
One passenger Mustapha Bahcecioglu is apparently emerging as the big hero. He is a security expert at the Dutch railways and helped some 15 people, including children, from the plane, by crawling through the rear of the plane. He said there was no warning of any trouble, they just ‘slammed down into the field’. He said he saw ‘many people dead and badly injured’ which he could not help. The passengers were taken to a nearby barn of a farm where the triage medical personnel divided the passengers into two sections: badly injured and uninjured or slightly injured. He said the number of badly-injured passengers were many – ‘there was a lot of blood, a lot of crying, and doctors trying to save them.’ he told NOS news agency.

He felt as if he’d won the lottery’ by surviving unscathed. The plane had a lot of business people and vacationers on board, he said, including small children.

Many of the survivors had also crawled from the plane by themselves. The uninjured survivors were taken by buses to their relatives who were waiting at the airport and were being reunited at a nearby sports centre, Wildenhorst, in the nearby town of Badhoevedorp.

Schiphol ‘s runways are closed at the moment. Weather conditions can’t be blamed for the crash experts say: vision was clear, only a little bit hazy although overcast, and there is little wind. The NOS news agency of the Netherlands, says experts rate the airline as not having a good name in the aviation industry because it’s had a variety of hijackings and crashes.

Ambulances are parked on a nearby roadway because the newly-plowed farm fields are very wet. The nearby farm house has been set up as a triage emergency centre. from where ambulance personnel are taking the victims to the nearby ambulances. The plane has broken into three pieces at the rump and in the tail section, and an engine has broken away. A Turkish airlines spokesman said at least 50 passengers remained unharmed, according to the NOS news agency.

The plane crashed at 10:40 a.m. on February 25 in a polder next to the Polderbaan runway.
Passengers were seen to evacuate the plane, an eye witness said. This eye witness also said the plane crashed when it tried to land.

RTL-radio journalist Onno Beukers said the plane is lying just before the Schiphol Polderbaan runway near the A9 highway. An eye-witness told NOS TV news that the plane had been approaching this runway when it crashed into the polder. Some 20 ambulances are on the scene to provide medical help for 135 passengers, who had arrived from Turkey.

Benno Baksteen of Platform Aviation in the Netherlands says that judging from its position, it looks as if the plane attempted to make an emergency landing in the wet polder, which lies directly below the approach to the Polderbaan runway.

Schiphol airport has “difficult landing and take-off procedures because of the strict sound limitations,” he said, but Polderbaan is not known as a ‘difficult runway’.

Accident Description : The aircraft, on a scheduled passenger flight from Newark, crashed while on approach to the Buffalo/Niagara International Airport. The twin-engine turboprop had been cleared for the ILS approach to runway 23 in icy weather conditions when it disappeared from radar approximately 5 miles northeast of the airport. Soon after, it was reported that the aircraft had crashed into a residence and exploded in flames near the Buffalo suburb of Clarence Center.

With a section of the tail visible, firefighters sprayed the scene of the crash

By MATTHEW L. WALD and JON ELSEN

Published: February 13, 2009, New York Times

Federal investigators have retrieved both “black boxes” from a Continental Airlines plane that crashed late Thursday night near Buffalo, killing 50 people. The boxes — the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder — were found in good condition and should reach the laboratories of the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington this afternoon for analysis, officials said.

The plane, which crashed in the hamlet of Clarence Center, N.Y., carried 44 passengers, a crew of 4 and an off-duty airline employee on a flight from Newark to Buffalo, officials said. Everyone aboard the plane and one person in a house destroyed by the plane was killed, said Chris Collins, the Erie County executive.

Two others in the house, a 57-year-old woman and her 22-year-old daughter, suffered minor injuries and were taken to a nearby hospital, where they were treated and released, officials said.

Among those on the flight was Alison L. Des Forges, a historian and human rights advocate who documented the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and investigated related issues in Burundi and Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to Emma Daly, communications director of Human Rights Watch in New York City.

Also on the flight was Beverly Eckert, the widow of Sean Rooney, a Buffalo native who died at the World Trade Center in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Ms. Eckert was on her way to Buffalo for a weekend celebration of what would have been her husband’s 58th birthday, and had planned to take part in the presentation of a scholarship award at Canisius High School that she had established in his honor, The Buffalo News reported.

Ms. Eckert met President Obama last week at the White House, along with other relatives of people killed in the 2001 attacks or the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

Speaking at the White House late Friday morning, Mr. Obama said that Ms. Eckert “was an inspiration to me and to so many others, and I pray that her family finds peace and comfort in the hard days ahead.”

He said that the crash reminds the nation of the fragility of life and the value of each day.

The New York Times

Continental Airlines said the pilot of the flight, Continental Connection Flight 3407, was Capt. Marvin Renslow; the first officer was Rebecca Shaw; flight attendants were Matilda Quintero and Donna Prisco; and the off-duty employee traveling on the flight was Capt. Joseph Zuffoletto. The flight was operated by Colgan Air under contract to Continental.

Maddy Loftus, 24, from Parsippany, N.J., was on the flight traveling to a reunion of the women’s ice hockey team at Buffalo State University, said Jeff Ventura, the sports information director at the school. Ms. Loftus played forward for Buffalo State from 2002 to 2004 and transferred to St. Mary’s University in Minnesota where she finished her college career.

After the crash, other pilots flying in the area reported icing on their planes, and there was some speculation in the news media that the weather at the time of the crash may have played a role. The airplane that crashed was certified for flying into icing conditions, and the crews of such planes are trained to deal with ice.

No one in the surrounding houses was injured, officials said.Photo: Gary Wiepert/Reuters

“This is a tragic day in the history of New York,” New York Gov. David A. Paterson said at a news conference. “This is a difficult hour for the families.”

Governor Paterson described his discussions with families of the victims. “I saw a woman whose fiancé was killed in the plane crash, she has three little daughters,” he said. “A woman a native in China, a researcher living in Buffalo and a doctor, she doesn’t have any family members here. She lost her husband.”

Referring to Ms. Eckert, he said: “Now she and her husband, Sean, have been lost in different tragedies, one in an attack on our country.”

He said he saw the family of Ms. Des Forges, whom he described as “a noted writer, a foremost expert on Rwanda, a great human being and a human services coordinator.” And he said he spoke with a state trooper who lost a cousin.

An intense fire at the site of the crash, fueled by a natural gas leak, initially made it difficult for the investigators to retrieve the black boxes, according to Steven Chealander, a member of the safety board who is acting as spokesman for the crash investigation. Fourteen investigators from the board are at work seeking the cause of the crash, he said in a news conference Friday morning.

The airplane is a relatively new model, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 with two turboprop engines and room for 74 passengers. Colgan has been operating that type of plane since February 2008. Its flight data recorder should have captured hundreds of data points each second about the performance of the airplane and its condition, which can aid investigators in reconstructing the accident. While there apparently was no sign of trouble in the communications between the crew and ground controllers during the flight, the cockpit voice recorder could provide information from conversations among the crew, as well as other sounds that their microphones may have picked up.

Tony Tatro, who lives near the crash site, told CNN that he was driving home when the plane passed about 75 feet overhead, with its nose pitched lower than normal and its wings tilted. The plane struck the ground moments later, he said.

The plane crashed about 10:20 p.m. Eastern time, five minutes before it was due to land. David Bissonette, the emergency coordinator for Erie County, told reporters around 4 a.m. that the plane had made “a direct hit” on the house at 6038 Long Street in Clarence Center, part of the Town of Clarence northeast of Buffalo. The site is about five miles from the airport.

“It’s remarkable that it only took one house,” he said. “It could have easily taken the whole neighborhood.”

Mr. Bissonnette said the only piece of the plane that remained recognizable was the tail. The investigation, he said, would be “painstaking” because of the amount of damage to the plane and the house.

Mr. Collins said that about 12 nearby houses were evacuated after the crash and that a limited state of emergency had been declared.

Sandra Baker, who lives on Railroad Street, two blocks from the site of the crash on Thursday, said: “It was just like a huge great big crash, a boom.”

Both of her sons, volunteer firefighters, went to the scene.

“There was this banging sound” before the crash, she said. It was followed by a boom, then a dark cloud and flames and the smell of fuel and fire.

A joint investigation was being conducted overnight by the State Police, the Erie County Sheriff’s Office and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority.Photo: Charles Anderson/Associated Press

Another woman who lives nearby described the sound before the crash as “a loud roar over my house.”

“It was like the whole house shook,” said the woman, Jennifer Clark, who also lives on Railroad Street. “Then there was silence.”

Ms. Clark said she looked out of her window and saw a ball of flames rising into the sky.

She woke up her husband and said, “I think a plane just crashed.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel bad for the people on the plane and their families. I feel bad for the firemen who have to recover the remains of those poor people.”

Ms. Baker described the town as “small-town U.S.A.,” a place that will reel from what she was sure would be the biggest tragedy the town has ever seen.

The crash will be investigated jointly by the New York State Police, the Erie County Sheriff’s Office and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority as well as the federal officials from the safety board, who will take the lead.

At a command center where officials gathered after the accident, Chris Kausner told CNN that his sister was on the flight. He said she was connecting from Jacksonville, Fla., where she was a law student. When a reporter asked Mr. Kausner how his family was taking the news, he said: “I heard my mother make a sound into the phone that I had never heard before. So, not good.”

In the neighborhood where the crash occurred, flames rose high above the bare trees and neat houses overnight. Neighbors rushed from their homes to the carnage, through a swell of emergency lights and sirens.

Brendan Biddlecom, who lives a few blocks from the crash, made his way with other neighbors.

“I didn’t get too close,” Mr. Biddlecom said. “I didn’t want to get too close. It was clear what was going on.”

By 2:30 a.m., the police had set up checkpoints around the neighborhood and had cleared the immediate vicinity of the crash. The smell of burning fuel and rubber was still thick in the air.

Scott Bylewski, the Clarence town supervisor, said he heard the crash from his home about a half-mile away. “I took a look from my house and the sky was red,” Mr. Bylewski said at the 4 a.m. news conference. “I know when I go home, I’m going to give my wife and kids a kiss.”

Colgan, the operator of the plane, also flies feeder routes for US Airways and United Airlines. Colgan’s Web site said the airline operates about 50 aircraft, including 15 of the Q400 model, and recently reached an agreement with Continental to add 15 more aircraft. Colgan, which has flown for Continental since 1997, is owned by Pinnacle Airlines Corporation, based in Memphis. Pinnacle has about 6,000 employees around North America, 1,800 of them in Memphis.

The last fatal crash involving a scheduled carrier in the United States was a ComAir regional jet in Lexington, Ky., in August 2006. The crew attempted to take off from a runway that was too short; 47 passengers and 2 of the 3 crew members were killed.

During the day on Thursday, Continental posted a notice on its Web site that its operations would be affected by the winter storm on the East Coast, including the Buffalo and New York City areas.

The storm caused delays of up to five hours on arrivals at Newark Liberty International Airport on Thursday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. That was unusual even for that airport, which routinely has some of the worst delays of any destination in the country.

Early on Friday, the F.A.A.’s Web site showed delays at Newark of three hours and 50 minutes.

Micheline Maynard contributed reporting from Detroit, Michael D. Regan from Clarence Center, N.Y., Trymaine Lee and Liz Robbins from New York and David Stout from Washington.